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Vintage Books, 1993).
6
See Graham Ward, Christ and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005).
7
The term  theopolitical or  theopolitics is taken from Cavanaugh, Theopolitical
Imagination.
8
This definition is taken from the Philip Babcock Gove (ed.), Webster s Third New
International Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield: Merriam-Webster, 1993),
cited in Matthew Whelan,  The Responsible Body: A Eucharistic Community, Cross
Currents (Fall 2001), 359 78. Also,  body politics is defined as  people organized and
united under an authority.
9
James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-Secular Theology
(Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004), 253.
116 SHARING IN THE BODY OF CHRIST
to one another; it is the power of giving one s life for the other. In other
words, this is the theopolitical power of caritas, where the extraordinary
embraces and transfigures the ordinary: God s  sovereignty disclosed at
the breaking of the bread, as Samuel Wells remarks.10
Taking the same approach that I have used in earlier chapters, my
point of departure here will be a concrete narrative of food: Isak Dinesen s
novel, Babette s Feast, where something extraordinary takes place. The
act of eating food not only satiates human hunger but also becomes an
ecstatic experience that transforms self and community. Babette gives
away her riches, her own self-expression. And yet this giving does not
impoverish her, but, rather, highlights the excess (the infinite creative
caritas) of giving itself. From the Christian narrative we could also envision
God as a sort of Babette, the cook par excellence whose superabundant
edible gift is the very source of caritas that creates and sustains the world
while inviting humanity to share this same (yet repeated differently,
perpetually) divine gift with one another.
After discussing Babette s Feast I will explore the Hebrew and Christian
figure of God s feast communicated as the  manna from heaven, which,
like Dinesen s story, shows something extraordinary and  strange
taking place: God not only cares for his people by satiating hunger, but
God s desire to be near humanity is further expressed with an intimate
kenotic gesture of becoming food and drink, nourishment itself.
Christianity believes that through the ingestion of this divine manna
(Christ s body and blood) God abides in the partaker as much as the
partaker also abides in God. The Eucharist is a practice of this divine
and human co-abiding that constitutes the Body of Christ.
The figure of the manna will be further explored from the perspective
of the gift  an edible gift. As Babette offers her culinary gift in the midst
of a gift-exchange community, and transfigures the community by her
lavish gift, so the eucharistic gift is a reintensification and revitalization
of a complex gift-exchange system: the Trinitarian gift exchange that is
perpetually shared with  and from within  creation, and is then
repeated non-identically in further examples of caritas among human
communities, by humanity with creation, and by all of creation in Christ,
with the Holy Spirit returning the gift to God as a doxology.
The final section of this chapter will explore the dilemma of super-
abundance, and how a theopolitical horizon offers an alternative for a
practice to orienting desire toward God, for whom superabundance and
caritas constitute one and the same divine gift.
10
Samuel Wells, God s Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell,
2006), 210.
SHARING IN THE BODY OF CHRIST 117
1 Babette s Transformative Sharing
Babette enters into the life of a small town with puritanical and rigid
religious practices where  in the words of Dinesen s narrating voice 
 its members renounced the pleasures of this world, for the earth and
all that it held to them was but a kind of illusion, and the true reality
was the New Jerusalem toward which they were longing. 11 This strange
woman, Babette, breaks into the earthly life of these townspeople
because she is escaping from the consequences of the French Revolution,
which has brought death to her own family and taken away all her
belongings. Poor, and deprived of all her possessions and beloved family,
she begs to be welcomed. She is received by two elderly sisters (Martine
and Philippa) who have become, after the death of their father, the spir-
itual leaders of this religious community. Since these sisters are very
poor, and since the idea of having a cook in their house is too extrava-
gant for them, the women are at first skeptical about taking Babette
into their household. Nevertheless, in an act of charity and after reading
a letter of recommendation from an old friend (a French opera singer,
Monsieur Papin, who in his younger years had fallen in love with one of
the sisters), they finally decide to welcome Babette into their lives.
Babette s culinary skills are evident right from the start. Not only is
she an extraordinary cook, but she also has a profound sense of service
to the community, particularly toward the ill and infirm. She even reduces
the costs of housekeeping:  And they soon found that from the day
when Babette took over the housekeeping its cost was miraculously
reduced, and the soup-pails and baskets acquired a new, mysterious
power to stimulate and strengthen their poor and sick. 12 However, the
initial harmony and wellbeing of the community created by Babette s
presence are soon disturbed.
Babette receives a letter from France confirming that she has won a
lottery. In her astonishment, she announces to the sisters her new fortune
of ten thousand francs. While the sisters share in the joy over Babette s
new wealth and good luck, they also seem troubled by the idea that she
might leave them because of this new financial status. Turbulence seems
to be in the air, for Babette s news coincides with a new experience of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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